Bees have received a lot of attention over the last five years. You could say they’ve become media darlings, of sorts. The “disappearance” of 30 billion honeybees—one quarter of the population in the northern hemisphere—from hives in North America and…
When I first began to explore the history of Toronto’s Don River Valley five years ago, the story of the major highway that runs through the valley failed to capture my imagination. I was interested in the effects of highway…
When I first moved to Toronto from British Columbia ten years ago, I took up a job with the Multicultural History Society of Ontario, coordinating an oral history project on the Scarborough community of Agincourt. Conducted in partnership with the…
Part of my doctoral research on the social and environmental history of Toronto’s Don River Valley involved making sense of the area’s industrial past. Given the volatile nature of nineteenth-century industry—some companies opening and closing again in short succession, others…
Toronto’s Lower Don River slides unceremoniously along the eastern limits of the old city core, its muddied, placid channel host to the scattered wreckage of twenty-first-century urban living: plastic bags snagged at intervals along its length; a rusting shopping cart…
Part of the purpose of Teaching the Past: A Blog About Teaching History in Canada is to discuss experiences and strategies related to teaching history in diverse venues. In the fall of 2010, I was invited to teach a course on the…
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